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" A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.' "
Kevin Young
Connection
Dance
DJ
Related Quotes:
" One of the most troubling things about the term 'fake news' is that it has become a force field against accusations you don't like. "
Kevin Young
Against
Become
News
" Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience. "
Kevin Young
Race
True
Conscience
" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "
Kevin Young
Internet
Free
Think
" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "
Kevin Young
Grade
Read
Ten
" I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus. "
Kevin Young
Culture
Now
Think
" I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly. "
Kevin Young
Influence
End
Up
" Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution. "
Kevin Young
Soul
Love
Revolution
" Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.' "
Kevin Young
Moments
Life
Book
" In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that. "
Kevin Young
Feel
Forget
Like
" When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I. "
Kevin Young
Tough
Day
Judge
" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "
Kevin Young
Prepare
First
Election
" The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world. "
Kevin Young
People
Music
History
" It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't. "
Kevin Young
People
Want
Book
" In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has. "
Kevin Young
Someone
Bible
Culture
" I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain. "
Kevin Young
Earth
Sun
Rain
" I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that. "
Kevin Young
Story
Way
Want
" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "
Kevin Young
History
Hysteria
Racism
" Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me. "
Kevin Young
Feel
Me
Choose
" That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that. "
Kevin Young
Experience
Turn
Need
" I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "
Kevin Young
Going
Think
Some
" A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection. "
Kevin Young
Solace
Poem
Testimony
" I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret. "
Kevin Young
Keep
Think
Things
" There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that. "
Kevin Young
Time
Culture
Eyes
" I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there. "
Kevin Young
Both
Parents
Up
" I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets. "
Kevin Young
World
Think
Looking
" I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible? "
Kevin Young
Looking
Looking Back
Think
" Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role. "
Kevin Young
Year
Classic
Iconic
" To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it. "
Kevin Young
Poetry
Me
Different
" Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r. "
Kevin Young
Words
Facts
Here
" Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South. "
Kevin Young
History
Forgotten
Shame